Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [149]
We were feeling a little deflated. “Do you think we came in the wrong season?” we asked Alexis.
“I think we came in the wrong century.”
We experienced a moment of irrationality. Why hadn't we come in the 1800s? The early European settlers in Tasmania had not appreciated the thylacine. They had called it a hyena.
We wondered what would have happened if the Tasmanian aboriginals had ventured north and colonized Eurasia instead of the other way around. They could have sailed on ships made out of giant trees and flown under the flag of the thylacine, or Ghost Corinna. They might have found the animals north of Wallace's Line as bewildering as Europeans had found the wildlife of Australia and named the Bengal tiger “pouchless corinna” and the timber wolf “stripeless pouchless animal with the corinna head.”
“What do you think they would have called the beaver?” we asked.
“How about the wombat that swims with the fishes.”
As we were crossing the Tasman Bridge into Hobart's city center, we retrieved a message on our cell phone from Chris Vroom. We had not seen him since we parted company in the Milkshakes, though he had updated us periodically. Since then, Chris had gone scuba diving in the Tasman Sea, flown in a seaplane down the remote Gordon River, and crossed paths with three venomous tiger snakes on a hiking trail. But this last dispatch was different. He had chanced on an exhibition about the tiger in Strahan, a tourist hub on Tasmania's west coast. “I found something unbelievable,” he said. “There was a rug made out of the skins of eight thylacines.” The reception was crackling but we heard the emotion in his voice. Chris, who had been so cheerful, now sounded depressed. “The pelts were so beautiful and strange. Seeing them stitched together like that, as if they were going to upholster a couch … it's just so sad about the tiger …I get it now.”
The next morning Alexis packed some of his supplies into a box to mail back to New York. “You never know what the Department of Homeland Security's attitude is going to be toward devil scat,” he said. We noticed he had addressed the package to Dorothy's brownstone in Greenwich Village.
“How much of that scat are you sending?”
“Just a few pieces. I got rid of most of it.”
What did that mean? We went into the bathroom of the motel where we were staying and saw that he had dumped most of the Baggie-ful of chunky wombat scats down the toilet. It was horribly clogged.
“You have to do it one at a time,” we screamed, frantically trying to stop the overflow. We spent the next ten minutes with a coat hanger helping to guide the scats to their final destination.
This was going to be our last day in Tasmania. And our last stop was the old Beaumaris Zoo, the spot where the last known Tasmanian tiger had perished in 1936—the one that Col said had been captured in the area around Adamsfield. Alexis wanted to get some material from the zoo to use as pigment for a portrait of the tiger. The zoo had closed decades earlier, but some of its ruins still stood in the Queens Domain, an old section of Hobart originally reserved for the use of the island's colonial governor and that was now public parkland.
Just off the Tasman Highway on the Domain Road, we found the abandoned zoo. It was tightly locked and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. But it hadn't been forgotten. A section of fence had been cut out and flat, metal animal sculptures inserted. One of them was a sad-eyed, cartoony-looking thylacine depicted behind bars. A sign below read “Ghosts of Fur and Feathers.”
To get a closer look, we squeezed through a hole in the fence. The zoo had been built into a cliffside overlooking the Derwent River and was on knobby, rough terrain. We walked past what had once been the polar bears' moat. It was drained and deserted. Otherwise, all that remained were a few stone walls on the bare, brown ground.
At one time Hobart's zoo had